Themes and style

Most of Moravia's works deal with themes such as moral aridity, the hypocrisy in today's life and the substantial incapability of finding happiness in traditional ways like love or marriage. These themes are usually demonstrated as a kind of typical pathology of middle-class life; marriage, in particular, is the main target of works such as Disobedience and L'amore coniugale (1949). In works like Il disprezzo and La noia (both from the 1950s), the main theme is alienation, despite being always observed from a rational and realistic point of view. Political themes are often present: an example is La Romana, the story of a young prostitute entangled with the Fascist police regime and with a net of conspirers. The extreme realism of sexuality in La noia introduced the more experimental and psychology-oriented works of the 1970s.

Moravia's style was highly regarded for extreme starkness and lack of adornment, characterized by very elementary and common words (although within a very elaborate syntactic background). Propositions constitute often a description of a single psychological observation which mix one with another to form a complex state of mood. In later works, the use of inner monologue becomes increasingly prominent.